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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2014

How far have feminist linguistic reforms succeeded? The case of “Mademoiselle” in French

Ann Coady

Résumé

The French government decided in 2012 to erase Mademoiselle from official government forms. Has this initiative tolled the death knell for Mademoiselle? What are the results of these two feminist linguistic reforms today in English and French? Using a corpus linguistics, two French broadsheets are analysed. The analysis is based on the written press as this offers a certain representation of French society as well as being a site where the discursive construction of social (and therefore gendered) identities take place. The corpus linguistics perspective allows for a quantitative and qualitative examination of the data: how frequently are courtesy titles used, and what types of discourses can be uncovered in the collocations, concordances, and semantic preferences of a text? A survey with over 1000 French speakers completes the analysis of newspaper texts. How do women negotiate their identities on a daily basis by the titles they chose to employ, and according to their communities of practice which frame their choices at any given moment?What are their attitudes towards titles, and what are people's attitudes to their choices?
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Dates et versions

hal-04012891 , version 1 (03-03-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04012891 , version 1

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Ann Coady. How far have feminist linguistic reforms succeeded? The case of “Mademoiselle” in French. IGALA8 (International Gender And Language Association), Simon Fraser University, Jun 2014, Vancouver, Canada. ⟨hal-04012891⟩

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